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Beginning with Mr Sampath: The Printer of Malgudi (1949) and culminating with The Painter of Signs (1976), the novels of R. K. Narayan's middle period represent his finest achievement. The protagonists of these novels are usually small businessmen in the second asrama of life, whose occupations are contemporary versions of the scribal and priestly roles traditionally undertaken by Tamil brahmins. Narayan's other works include The Guide (1958), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Financial Expert (1952) and The Vendor of Sweets (1967). Though their particular subjects and angles of focalisation vary, the recurrent concern of the middle-period novels is an exploration of the conflicts that occur when seemingly settled Hindu values, usually personified by the protagonist, are challenged by the incursion of alien forces. These novels also demonstrate an investigative approach to the narrativisation of Malgudi.

The Painter of Signs (1976) is R. K. Narayan's last major novel. The fiction that he produced in his seventies and eighties is variable in quality, but generally demonstrates a falling-off in his talents. Nevertheless, it develops interesting variations on several of the defining themes of his novels, particularly the passage into the fourth stage of the varnasramadharma, the discursive constitution of space, oral mythologies and Hindu reverence for animal life and the natural world. The last of these concerns is central to both the theme and the point of view of the novel that he has referred to as his favourite, A Tiger for Malgudi (1983). In one sense, A Tiger for Malgudi returns to issues explored in The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961). It is useful to consider some of the tropological associations with which tigers have been invested in India. At least one strand of the narrative of Narayan's next novel, Talkative Man (1986), suggests a parallel with A Tiger for Malgudi. Another late Narayan novel is The World of Nagaraj (1990).

R. K. Narayan's invented South Indian town of Malgudi, which is the setting for virtually all his fiction, has been seen by many of his readers as a site that represents quintessential Indianness. In various readings, Malgudi becomes a metonym for a traditional India, a locus that exists outside time and apart from the forces of modernity, a site which the complicitous ‘we’ used in both passages will immediately recognise as ‘authentic’. Tamil intertexts become more prominent in the second half of Narayan's career, but they occur in a dialectical relationship with his Western influences and novels such as The Guide. He may have chosen to write in English and for the most part turned his back on Tamil intertexts, but Tamil brahmin contexts are omnipresent in his work. Narayan's fiction is underpinned by four stages: the brahmacharya, grihastya, vanaprastha and sanyasa.

Three of R. K. Narayan's novels – Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher (1945) – are often grouped together as a kind of loose trilogy about the coming of age of the male protagonist. In Swami and Friends, Malgudi is far more than an anglicized version of South India, and it provides Narayan with a locus that enables him to stage some of the conflicts and conjunctions which characterised the social world in which he had come of age during the latter days of the Raj. The kind of modernity introduced by colonialism figures prominently in the opening sections of The Bachelor of Arts. A concern with gender relations informs every aspect of another novel, The Dark Room (1938).

Despite his involvement with Graham Greene and his tailoring aspects of his fiction to suit British tastes, R. K. Narayan did not travel outside India until the second half of his life. Then, after receiving a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship that took him to the United States in 1956, he paid a number of visits to American universities, among them the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin. Notable among these was a period as Visiting Professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City in the spring of 1969, a visit that he wrote about without identifying his hosts in one of his best-known essays, the title piece of his collection, Reluctant Guru (1974). This chapter focuses on Narayan's middle-period novels, including The Guide (1958), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), The Vendor of Sweets (1967) and The Painter of Signs (1976).

Graham Greene's shadow has hung over much of the critical response to R. K. Narayan's fiction, particularly reviews of his novels. Greene's view of Narayan as a mediator of essential Indianness for his Western sensibility recurs in the remarks of various later Western commentators, particularly prior to the advent of the post-Rushdie generation of fiction writers. Numerous other critics have considered aspects of Narayan's Hinduism, with the more perceptive commentators stressing the secular nature of his vision. For biographical information, Narayan's memoir My Days (1964) is the most important single source, while his encounters with American life are detailed in My Dateless Diary (1964). Narayan's treatment of gender has received attention from critics who have mainly been concerned with examining his representation of the role of women in twentieth-century South Indian life. Narayan's novels have also been read in numerous other ways. He has been seen as a commentator on Gandhianism, colonialism and cricket, amid many other things. Finally, though, Narayan has always been seen as the chronicler of Malgudi.

Ranga Rao furthers his critique by picking up Narayan’s debut novel, Swami and Friends. The very simplicity of the story signals thrifty talent and daring originality of theme. This novel also establishes the character of Malgudi, a small town located in a corner of south India. Swami and Friends also presents a basic plan common to so many of Narayan’s novels, that is, an uprooting followed by a return, a renewal, and a restoration of normalcy. The protagonist, Swami, establishes the sattvic temper, the truth-searching mind, the conscionability, which are the hallmarks of Narayan’s heroes, especially, of the pre-Independence novels. The slim novel is also epochal in the history of the Indian novel in English: one of the three novels—with Anand’s Untouchable and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura—in the 1930s, launching a new phase in the development of the Indian novel in English.